EPOC

While on the quest for fat loss, many people place far too much focus on how many calories they are burning during their exercise sessions, while forgetting to account for the calories that will be burned because of that exercise session — after all is said and done. If you train in the proper way, you can actually greatly enhance the total amount of fat burned with your exercise program by taking advantage of these additional calories lost after the training program is completed.

what is epoc?

These calories are collectively known as Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC). What this basically represents is how many additional calories your body will burn after the exercise session has been completed in order to return your body to the state it was in before the exercise took place.

This will include a variety of different processes that are related to recovery, such as increasing the amount of muscle glycogen contained in the muscle that's been depleted during the workout, restoring the blood lactate levels to normal and bringing down the heart rate and body temperature.

what affects epoc?

If your goal is to achieve a maximum fat loss, you will want to optimize EPOC as best as you can, thereby increasing the total number of calories you burn that day.

The degree of EPOC you experience has a direct correlation to the intensity of your workout session. The harder you are able to work out, the more you will disrupt all the measures listed above and, therefore, the more energy your body will need to expend to bring them back down to normal once again.

Furthermore, there are certain variables within your workout that you can alter to get that "after burn" up even higher:

Rest periods

When trying to maximize EPOC, taking slightly shorter rest periods will help. This forces your body to work harder without as much recovery between sets, so you will require more in-depth recovery after the session has been completed.

You don't want to take it so far that you sacrifice your ability to lift heavy weights, because that, as you will learn next, also increases EPOC.

Heavy lifting

As you go about your weight-lifting session, trying to lift weights as heavy as possible will further enhance the energy your body needs to repair itself later.

You've probably already noticed that after a heavy set on the weights your heart rate is up a lot higher, particularly if it's a lower-body exercise. This increased heart rate is what helps generate EPOC, so the longer the period of time it is elevated, the greater the number of calories that will be burned.

When comparing a heavy resistance training session, (3 sets of 8 exercises, 3-8 reps per set at 80-90% 1 rep max, also known as RM) to a circuit training protocol consisting of 4 sets of 8 exercises performed for 15 reps at 50% 1 RM, a higher degree of EPOC is seen in the former.

So, if you are currently doing more of a circuit training program and if you think that this is more aerobic in nature and will therefore burn more calories, you may want to reconsider.